Okay. So I'd save that much in the first year of ownership. But if the Tier 1 TVs that can only be sold in California costs substantially more than that (Say $30-$50), it could take years to recoup savings on the electrical bill.
If by "natural equilibrium" Agent Smith means that population cycles tend to follow rises and Malthusian crashes... then no, we haven't done that yet for a few hundred years. And we should make ever effort to avoid it. The only way people should die is peacefully in old age.
I have no use for that kind of misanthropy. If you really think that humans are a cancer, what are you doing sitting in front of your computer, posting this?
I guess since real estate in Boston and New York City is so affordable, those are the models we should emulate.
Oh, wait...
I see growing numbers of combined condo/retail developments these days. The thing is, more and more businesses are actually located in those suburbs you seem to hate so much. It's useless for me to live within two miles of an urban center is my job is actually located in another suburb.
There's one very good reason why private industry hasn't put people in orbit yet.
There's no profit in it.
Oh, there's profit in commercial satellites. We have thousands of them orbiting. But to actually put people in orbit is still a money-losing proposition. Although that might change in the medium term.
Ever heard of Bigelow Aerospace?
Governments may lead the way, but it's private citizens who really make changes. It's been like that for centuries, from Columbus, to Lewis and Clark, to Alan Shepherd. It was often a century or more before settlers followed explorers into the New World, and space may follow that example. But in order to get any real movement, there has to be something else: Profit.
Trade offs? But that would mean compromise. Why should they compromise on anything? The Earth is at stake!
Around here, we have the Sunrise Powerlink that local groups have been opposing. The state of California has mandated that utilities get 20% of their electricity from renewable resources by 2010. To that end, there will be a pair of massive new solar thermal powerplants (contracted to Stirling Energy Systems) developed out in the desert. Now, in order to get that power to market, for the sake of cost and transmission efficiency it needs to go as short a route as possible. But in order to do that it has to cross Borrego. The local environmentalists can't be having with that, of course.
When this happens, it's no longer NIMBYism. It's BANANA: Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything.
What you're saying is that my unwillingness to spend 5 hours commuting to and from work each day using the bus makes me "elitist"?
I'll put it this way. My time is valuable. It is not sensible for me to spend five times as much of it each day using public transportation to commute. You are punishing those of us who simply cannot afford to move closer to their workplaces.
There is nothing more permanent than a temporary government program.
At some point, a bureaucracy stops existing to serve its original purpose, and only serves to perpetuate itself. An example here was a tax on phone service that was "temporarily" levied to pay for the Spanish-American War and was only repealed in 2005. Hundreds of billions of dollars that rightfully belonged to the people that earned for well over a century.
At what point so you say "Enough! No more taxes!"?
If they really want to do something new and inventive with Star Trek, they should center around a civilian ship. I'd like to see Starfleet and the Federation Government through the eyes of an entrepreneur. We saw hints of that in a couple episodes that involved cargo ships in Enterprise. There's a huge, untapped potential for storytelling in the Trek universe.
These cars should not be designed by people who only see them as Point A to Point B transportation. A car has always been much more than that. If you really want something that people will buy, you have to build something desirable that can offer great performance and great efficiency at once.
Want to know what I mean? Look up Tesla's electric roadster.
Your ancient 1300cc beater might serve you well, but don't for one minute think that everyone wants or can have your lifestyle.
If this car is "very old technology" as you say, like one of the original Honda Civics, then you're likely putting out a LOT of other smog-producing emissions. Perhaps get a Toyota Yaris instead?
Fossil fuels have a critical economic role right now, as they supply over 80% of our energy needs, and 98% in the transportation sector. We really don't have any economically viable replacements for gasoline, for instance. There are potential replacements in bio-butanol (BP and DuPont are working on that, among others). And a recently developed process can turn basically any kind of lipid into gasoline, diesel, or jet fuel.
We also can use algae, which have some massive oil yields, to replace fossil liquid fuels, especially using the process linked above.
The problem is that until these technologies are truly proven and commercialized, any efforts at reducing CO2 emissions will meet with limited success at best. All we're really doing is closing down factories and other energy-intensive manufacturing and moving it to China, which could surpass the United States as the biggest emitter of CO2 this year.
So I would qualify your statement with "If we do something before we're ready, the economy will implode."
Actually, it has become an emotional issue. We have people like James Lovelock and James Hansen saying we're doomed, Doomed, DOOMED! at the top of their lungs. When you drive people into a panic, they do not behave rationally. I've made some bad financial errors because I made an emotional purchase.
The language of catastrophe is not the language of science. It will not be visible in next year's global assessment from the world authority of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
To state that climate change will be "catastrophic" hides a cascade of value-laden assumptions which do not emerge from empirical or theoretical science.
Is any amount of climate change catastrophic? Catastrophic for whom, for where, and by when? What index is being used to measure the catastrophe?
The language of fear and terror operates as an ever-weakening vehicle for effective communication or inducement for behavioural change.
The language of politicians can be as strong as that of campaigners This has been seen in other areas of public health risk. Empirical work in relation to climate change communication and public perception shows that it operates here too.
Framing climate change as an issue which evokes fear and personal stress becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. By "sexing it up" we exacerbate, through psychological amplifiers, the very risks we are trying to ward off.
The careless (or conspiratorial?) translation of concern about Saddam Hussein's putative military threat into the case for WMD has had major geopolitical repercussions.
We need to make sure the agents and agencies in our society which would seek to amplify climate change risks do not lead us down a similar counter-productive pathway.
While not specifically named in the article, this seems a lot like butanol, a four-carbon alcohol. Its energy density is very close to gasoline, and far better than two-carbon ethanol. We can even use it to fuel modern gasoline engines without modification (the site I referenced ran several thousand miles in a 1992 Buick). BP and DuPont are co-operating on a project to bring butanol into the alternative fuels market.
But there is a law passed in 2002 that stipulated that utilities must get 20% of their power from renewable sources by 2010. The results of this law have been lackluster at best, with about 250MW of power constructed. This is because the State of California has two wholly separate regulatory bureaucracies that new projects must get approval from. The California law was about 13 pages long.
By comparison, Texas passed a similar law in 1999. So far, they've built 2000MW. Ten times as much in about twice the time.
Funny when Texas puts California to shame in renewable energy, eh?
I would like to add to the discussion a viewpoint from a climate scientist who does accept AGW, but rejects the idea that it will be catastrophic. This is by Mike Hulme, who is the Director of the Tyndell Centre for Climate Research.
I have found myself increasingly chastised by climate change campaigners when my public statements and lectures on climate change have not satisfied their thirst for environmental drama and exaggerated rhetoric.
It seems that it is we, the professional climate scientists, who are now the (catastrophe) sceptics. How the wheel turns.
The louder the Drums of Doom are beaten, the more it makes skeptics wonder if the motivations are political rather than scientific. A couple weeks ago the journal Nature had an article about "Green Scares", and why radical environmentalists have rejected science.
Another web site I recommend is World Climate Report, a blog that brings peer-reviewed science to light that does not support the current "consensus".
Still, I think it's important to hedge our bets. It behooves us to move away from fossil fuels simply because they are a finite resource.
What we really need, if there are to be any meaningful reductions in CO2 emissions, is a replacement for oil as a transportation fuel. Because of how central fossil fuels in general are to running our economies, even increasing efficiency won't necessarily do any good because of Jevons Paradox.
So, what do we have that can do it? Certainly not corn ethanol, which has a net energy return of 1.2:1, if we're lucky. We can't grow sugarcane in most of the United States, certainly. Cellulosic feedstocks have potential, and the R&D dollars are there. However, there is another option.
Algae as a feedstock for biodiesel, ethanol/butanol, or even Biomass-to-Liquids via a Fischer-Tropsh process. The UNH Biodiesel Group has outlines what we need to make this happen, at least one way. There are other companies working on this problem.
This story I think has the most exciting developments:
For a year, researchers watched algae multiply in huge, bubbling test tubes beneath the hot Arizona sun so they could find just the right strand of the microscopic single-celled plant.
The experiment has been so successful that it's about to expand into greenhouses on the plant grounds, and in time, be grown in such large quantities that it could be converted into fuel, cutting down on harmful greenhouse gases.
So, it soaks up CO2 emissions from powerplants, resulting in a net reduction of gases that would otherwise come from oil. Since we're not going to stop burning coal anytime soon, we now have a way to use that carbon twice.
I regard the Kyoto Protocol as nothing but a band-aid that puts the cart before the horse. Europe as a whole is not meeting their commitments. The CO2 Emissions Trading Scheme is a failure and will likely collapse. Canada and Spain, whose emissions are 30% and 50% over 1990, respectively, cannot meet their commitments without serious impacts on their economies.
California has a history of creating programs with the best of intentions that do not actually produce any results. Take, for instance, the 2002 law that mandated that electrical utilities must get 20% of their energy from renewable sources by 2010. The result has been over $300 million taken fron consumers in order to subsidize it, and not a penny spent? Why?
"It is an extraordinarily complicated process compared to any other state in the country," said Ryan Wiser, a scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory who has studied efforts by 21 states to mandate increases in the use of renewable power. Wiser wrote a paper on California's process titled "Does it Have to be this Hard? Implementing the Nation's Most Complex Renewables Portfolio Standard."
Wiser said that here, unlike anywhere else, two state agencies -- the California Energy Commission and the Public Utilities Commission -- have regulatory oversight of renewable projects, forcing developers and utilities to work with two distinct bureaucracies.
And each project faces multiple, and sometimes redundant, monthslong proceedings in front of regulators before getting approval, while most other states only require one.
The state of Texas is surpassing us in renewable energy development. Since they enacted their ten paragraph legislation in 1999, they've gotten 2,200 MW of wind power. How much have we gotten since 2002? 242MW. How long was our legislation? 13 pages.
What's more, renewables enjoy very broad bipartisan support in California. But since we do not have state government that is actually friendly to business, we get zip or very little actual action.
And all the while the politicians get to pat themselves on the back that they're Doing Something for the Greater Good!
It's crap like this why I've become more libertarian in my political outlook.
Nope. The law forbids them from raising the prices in California to make up for said cost, so in reality the cost will be borne by oil users in all the US, not just CA. This actually subsidizes the cost for CA residents at the expense of everyone else, a smart move on their part.
Actually, Prop 87 only taxes California oil production. The same taxes do not apply to oil purchased from out of state sources. Additionally, this is not a tax on profit. The net effect here will be:
1) Refiners will simply buy cheaper oil from out of state sources. 2) State oil production will drop as demand for its now more expensive oil goes elsewhere.
It's very easy to be generous with other people's money. Prop 87 is backed by a group of already-wealthy "green" venture capitalists who know just how risky it is to invest in alternative energy and would rather not risk their own money.
Brazil has the advantage of being a tropical nation where they can easily grow sugarcane, which is far, far easier to ferment into ethanol than corn is. They burn the stalks (bagasse) to run the fermentation plants and generate electricity, upping the total energy return to about 10:1. Corn ethanol is a horrible 1.2:1.
In Carter's time cellulosic technology wasn't even on the radar.
And in this country, the environmentalists will scream bloody murder if we try to actually use the coal resources we have (global warming and all) to acheive more energy independence.
I've been reading a lot of Charles Stross lately, and reading news like this inevitably makes me think about the singularity depicted in Accelerando and his other novels.
Aboard Ariane 5 was Cluster -- a $500 million set of four identical scientific satellites that were designed to to establish precisely how the Earth's magnetic field interacts with solar winds.
The unmanned rocket was on its first voyage after years of intense development by some of Europe's leading scientists. The explosion was a setback for Arianespace, whose previous models of the Ariane rocket had been some of the most reliable vehicles for satellite launches.
The European Space Agency estimated that total development of Ariane 5 cost more than $8 billion.
Maiden flights are perilous things. They got a full minute of flight data that they didn't have before. I'm sure the next one will be a success.
Slashdot Mirror
Okay. So I'd save that much in the first year of ownership. But if the Tier 1 TVs that can only be sold in California costs substantially more than that (Say $30-$50), it could take years to recoup savings on the electrical bill.
If by "natural equilibrium" Agent Smith means that population cycles tend to follow rises and Malthusian crashes... then no, we haven't done that yet for a few hundred years. And we should make ever effort to avoid it. The only way people should die is peacefully in old age.
I have no use for that kind of misanthropy. If you really think that humans are a cancer, what are you doing sitting in front of your computer, posting this?
I guess since real estate in Boston and New York City is so affordable, those are the models we should emulate.
Oh, wait...
I see growing numbers of combined condo/retail developments these days. The thing is, more and more businesses are actually located in those suburbs you seem to hate so much. It's useless for me to live within two miles of an urban center is my job is actually located in another suburb.
Hear hear!
Get out of the lab, get onto my roof!
There's one very good reason why private industry hasn't put people in orbit yet.
There's no profit in it.
Oh, there's profit in commercial satellites. We have thousands of them orbiting. But to actually put people in orbit is still a money-losing proposition. Although that might change in the medium term.
Ever heard of Bigelow Aerospace?
Governments may lead the way, but it's private citizens who really make changes. It's been like that for centuries, from Columbus, to Lewis and Clark, to Alan Shepherd. It was often a century or more before settlers followed explorers into the New World, and space may follow that example. But in order to get any real movement, there has to be something else: Profit.
Trade offs? But that would mean compromise. Why should they compromise on anything? The Earth is at stake!
Around here, we have the Sunrise Powerlink that local groups have been opposing. The state of California has mandated that utilities get 20% of their electricity from renewable resources by 2010. To that end, there will be a pair of massive new solar thermal powerplants (contracted to Stirling Energy Systems) developed out in the desert. Now, in order to get that power to market, for the sake of cost and transmission efficiency it needs to go as short a route as possible. But in order to do that it has to cross Borrego. The local environmentalists can't be having with that, of course.
When this happens, it's no longer NIMBYism. It's BANANA: Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything.
What you're saying is that my unwillingness to spend 5 hours commuting to and from work each day using the bus makes me "elitist"?
I'll put it this way. My time is valuable. It is not sensible for me to spend five times as much of it each day using public transportation to commute. You are punishing those of us who simply cannot afford to move closer to their workplaces.
There is nothing more permanent than a temporary government program.
At some point, a bureaucracy stops existing to serve its original purpose, and only serves to perpetuate itself. An example here was a tax on phone service that was "temporarily" levied to pay for the Spanish-American War and was only repealed in 2005. Hundreds of billions of dollars that rightfully belonged to the people that earned for well over a century.
At what point so you say "Enough! No more taxes!"?
Slashdot is not so much a news site as a collective blog, IMO.
If they really want to do something new and inventive with Star Trek, they should center around a civilian ship. I'd like to see Starfleet and the Federation Government through the eyes of an entrepreneur. We saw hints of that in a couple episodes that involved cargo ships in Enterprise. There's a huge, untapped potential for storytelling in the Trek universe.
These cars should not be designed by people who only see them as Point A to Point B transportation. A car has always been much more than that. If you really want something that people will buy, you have to build something desirable that can offer great performance and great efficiency at once.
Want to know what I mean? Look up Tesla's electric roadster.
Your ancient 1300cc beater might serve you well, but don't for one minute think that everyone wants or can have your lifestyle.
If this car is "very old technology" as you say, like one of the original Honda Civics, then you're likely putting out a LOT of other smog-producing emissions. Perhaps get a Toyota Yaris instead?
Fossil fuels have a critical economic role right now, as they supply over 80% of our energy needs, and 98% in the transportation sector. We really don't have any economically viable replacements for gasoline, for instance. There are potential replacements in bio-butanol (BP and DuPont are working on that, among others). And a recently developed process can turn basically any kind of lipid into gasoline, diesel, or jet fuel.
We also can use algae, which have some massive oil yields, to replace fossil liquid fuels, especially using the process linked above.
The problem is that until these technologies are truly proven and commercialized, any efforts at reducing CO2 emissions will meet with limited success at best. All we're really doing is closing down factories and other energy-intensive manufacturing and moving it to China, which could surpass the United States as the biggest emitter of CO2 this year.
So I would qualify your statement with "If we do something before we're ready, the economy will implode."
Read this piece by Dr. Mike Hulme, director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research:
Don't panic.
While not specifically named in the article, this seems a lot like butanol, a four-carbon alcohol. Its energy density is very close to gasoline, and far better than two-carbon ethanol. We can even use it to fuel modern gasoline engines without modification (the site I referenced ran several thousand miles in a 1992 Buick). BP and DuPont are co-operating on a project to bring butanol into the alternative fuels market.
And it's carbon neutral.
But there is a law passed in 2002 that stipulated that utilities must get 20% of their power from renewable sources by 2010. The results of this law have been lackluster at best, with about 250MW of power constructed. This is because the State of California has two wholly separate regulatory bureaucracies that new projects must get approval from. The California law was about 13 pages long.
By comparison, Texas passed a similar law in 1999. So far, they've built 2000MW. Ten times as much in about twice the time.
Funny when Texas puts California to shame in renewable energy, eh?
The louder the Drums of Doom are beaten, the more it makes skeptics wonder if the motivations are political rather than scientific. A couple weeks ago the journal Nature had an article about "Green Scares", and why radical environmentalists have rejected science.
Another web site I recommend is World Climate Report, a blog that brings peer-reviewed science to light that does not support the current "consensus".
Still, I think it's important to hedge our bets. It behooves us to move away from fossil fuels simply because they are a finite resource.
So, what do we have that can do it? Certainly not corn ethanol, which has a net energy return of 1.2:1, if we're lucky. We can't grow sugarcane in most of the United States, certainly. Cellulosic feedstocks have potential, and the R&D dollars are there. However, there is another option.
Algae as a feedstock for biodiesel, ethanol/butanol, or even Biomass-to-Liquids via a Fischer-Tropsh process. The UNH Biodiesel Group has outlines what we need to make this happen, at least one way. There are other companies working on this problem.
This story I think has the most exciting developments:
So, it soaks up CO2 emissions from powerplants, resulting in a net reduction of gases that would otherwise come from oil. Since we're not going to stop burning coal anytime soon, we now have a way to use that carbon twice.
I regard the Kyoto Protocol as nothing but a band-aid that puts the cart before the horse. Europe as a whole is not meeting their commitments. The CO2 Emissions Trading Scheme is a failure and will likely collapse. Canada and Spain, whose emissions are 30% and 50% over 1990, respectively, cannot meet their commitments without serious impacts on their economies.
Oil replacement first, then reduction.
Here's why:
The state of Texas is surpassing us in renewable energy development. Since they enacted their ten paragraph legislation in 1999, they've gotten 2,200 MW of wind power. How much have we gotten since 2002? 242MW. How long was our legislation? 13 pages.
What's more, renewables enjoy very broad bipartisan support in California. But since we do not have state government that is actually friendly to business, we get zip or very little actual action.
And all the while the politicians get to pat themselves on the back that they're Doing Something for the Greater Good!
It's crap like this why I've become more libertarian in my political outlook.
Nope. The law forbids them from raising the prices in California to make up for said cost, so in reality the cost will be borne by oil users in all the US, not just CA. This actually subsidizes the cost for CA residents at the expense of everyone else, a smart move on their part.
Actually, Prop 87 only taxes California oil production. The same taxes do not apply to oil purchased from out of state sources. Additionally, this is not a tax on profit. The net effect here will be:
1) Refiners will simply buy cheaper oil from out of state sources.
2) State oil production will drop as demand for its now more expensive oil goes elsewhere.
It's very easy to be generous with other people's money. Prop 87 is backed by a group of already-wealthy "green" venture capitalists who know just how risky it is to invest in alternative energy and would rather not risk their own money.
Brazil has the advantage of being a tropical nation where they can easily grow sugarcane, which is far, far easier to ferment into ethanol than corn is. They burn the stalks (bagasse) to run the fermentation plants and generate electricity, upping the total energy return to about 10:1. Corn ethanol is a horrible 1.2:1.
In Carter's time cellulosic technology wasn't even on the radar.
And in this country, the environmentalists will scream bloody murder if we try to actually use the coal resources we have (global warming and all) to acheive more energy independence.
I've been reading a lot of Charles Stross lately, and reading news like this inevitably makes me think about the singularity depicted in Accelerando and his other novels.
Eugene Volokh has a number of posts over on his group blog on this ruling:
http://www.volokh.com/
And yes, he IS a laywer.
And Dr. Richard Peilke of Colorado State says that only 28% of the observed warming is due to increases in CO2. There are scientists out there who are qualified to be skeptics. Also look at: http://www.climateaudit.org/
Maiden flights are perilous things. They got a full minute of flight data that they didn't have before. I'm sure the next one will be a success.